These gains cannot be achieved unless our businessmen maintain their spirit of initiative and enterprise and operate in a competitive economy.  They cannot be achieved unless our workingmen and women and their unions help to increase productivity and obtain for labor a fair share of the benefits of our economic system.  They cannot be achieved unless we have a stable and prosperous agriculture.  They cannot be achieved unless we conserve and develop our natural resources in the public interest.  Our system will not work unless our people are healthy, well-educated, and confident of the future.  It will not work unless all citizens can participate fully in our national life.

In achieving these gains the Government has a special responsibility to help create and maintain the conditions which will permit the growth we know is possible.  Foremost among these conditions is the need for a fair distribution of our increasing prosperity among all the great groups of our population who help to bring it about-labor, business, agriculture.

Businessmen must continue to have the incentives necessary for investment and for the development of new lines of enterprise.  In the future growth of this country, lie possibilities for hundreds of thousands of new and independent businesses.  As our national production increases, as it doubles and redoubles in the next 50 years, the number of independent and competing enterprises should also increase.  If the number does not increase, our constantly growing economy will fall under the control of a few dominant economic groups whose powers will be so great that they will be a challenge to democratic institutions.

To avoid this danger, we must curb monopoly and provide aids to independent business so that it may have the credit and capital to compete in a system of free enterprise.  I recommend that the Congress complete action at this session on the pending bill to close the loopholes in the Clayton Act which now permit monopolistic mergers.  I also hope before this session is over to transmit to the Congress a series of proposals to strengthen the antimonopoly laws, to assist small business, and to encourage the growth of new enterprises.

In the case of labor, free collective bargaining must be protected and encouraged.  Collective bargaining is not only a fundamental economic freedom for labor.  It is also a strengthening and stabilizing influence for our whole economy.

The Federal statute now governing labor relations is punitive in purpose and one-sided in operation.  This statute is, and always has been, inconsistent with the practice of true and effective collective bargaining.  It should be repealed and replaced by a law that is fair to all and in harmony with our democratic ideals.

A full understanding of the problems of modern labor relations is of such importance that I recommend the establishment of a labor extension service to encourage educational activities in this field.